Conservatives built Fox News into the most-watched cable network in America.
Fox just rewarded them by signing a top Democrat operative as a contributor.
The network they trusted to fight the Left just put the Left on the payroll.
Melissa DeRosa Gets a Fox News Podcast While Cuomo Nursing Home Families Get Nothing
Fox News announced that Melissa DeRosa is joining the network as a contributor and will co-host a new all-female roundtable podcast called "the Girls," premiering October 1.
The lineup for the first episode includes Rachel Campos-Duffy, Harris Faulkner, Kat Timpf, and former ESPN anchor Samantha Ponder.
Fox is billing the show as "no-holds-barred" with "refreshing candor."
The network's press release describes DeRosa as a "veteran Democratic strategist" who served as the first woman to hold the title of secretary to the New York governor.
That is a careful way of saying she ran the communications operation for Andrew Cuomo while his administration shoved COVID-positive hospital patients into nursing homes – and then hid how many residents died.
The Cuomo Nursing Home Cover-Up Tape That Should Have Ended Her Career
In February 2021, audio leaked from a private conference call DeRosa held with New York Democrat lawmakers.
She apologized for withholding the state's nursing home death tally.
Then she explained why the administration sat on the numbers.
"And basically, we froze," DeRosa told the lawmakers, adding the administration was not sure "if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren't sure if there was going to be an investigation."
That is not a bureaucratic delay.
That is a senior state official admitting on tape that she concealed death numbers to protect Cuomo from a federal investigation.
Democrat AG Letitia James confirmed New York had been hiding close to half the true death toll.
The real toll for nursing home residents sat around 15,000.
New York had been telling the public 8,500.
A 2021 New York State Assembly report alleged Cuomo personally edited the Health Department's figures to knock thousands off the public count.
Congressional investigators confirmed in 2024 that Cuomo's team engineered the March 25, 2020, directive forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients – and then deliberately excluded residents who died in hospitals after transfer from the official nursing home tally.
The families who buried those residents never got a straight answer from Albany.
Fox News just gave the woman at the center of that cover-up a platform and a paycheck.
What Fox Left Out of the Press Release About Janice Dean
Janice Dean spent 22 years at Fox News.
Her father-in-law and mother-in-law, Mickey and Dee Newman, died of COVID in New York care facilities in the spring of 2020.
She spent years on Fox demanding accountability from Cuomo – until the network shut her down.
After retiring in July 2026, she wrote: "Someday I'll tell you all the story of how I was banned to talk about Andrew Cuomo after I spent years speaking out about what he did to seniors during COVID."
Here is what Fox left out of the press release.
Fox News reported in 2021 that DeRosa worked to paint Dean as "merely a right-wing commentator" and coordinated with Chris Cuomo on how to undercut her credibility as she pressed the nursing home story.
Dean heard about the hire and did not stay quiet.
"Just a reminder: Melissa DeRosa helped smear the women who came forward about Andrew Cuomo's harassment, and played a hand in undercounting nursing home deaths during COVID," Dean wrote on X after the announcement.
Fox hired DeRosa anyway.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro went on Newsmax and told Trump supporters to stop assuming Fox is friendly to MAGA or friendly to Trump.
Hiring Andrew Cuomo's cover-up architect the same month they fired Maria Bartiromo is Fox's answer to that question.
The network that silenced a grieving woman demanding answers about her dead in-laws just gave a contributor contract to the aide who tried to destroy her.
Fox is calling it authentic female voices coming together.
Somewhere in New York, the families who buried parents and grandparents in 2020 know exactly what DeRosa's authenticity looks like.
She told Democrat lawmakers she froze.
The people in those buildings did not get that option.
Sources:
- Staff, "Fox News Hires Ex-Cuomo Aide Who Admitted To Covering Up Nursing Home Deaths," Daily Caller, September 28, 2026.
- Kyle Becker, "Fox News Under Fire for Hiring Cuomo Aide Who Admitted to COVID Nursing Home Cover-Up," RedState, September 28, 2026.
- Staff, "Cuomo aide attempts to clarify bombshell admission in COVID-19 nursing home deaths probe," Fox News, February 13, 2021.
- Staff, "Janice Dean speaks out amid reports Team Cuomo secretly plotted to discredit her," Fox News, December 13, 2021.
- Greg Kelly, "Peter Navarro Rips Fox News Over Bartiromo Ouster: Network Not Friendly to MAGA," Newsmax, September 9, 2026.